Crosstalk between microbiota and histone modifications in the healthy gut

Abstract

Histone modifications are a key component of the gene regulatory machinery. However, we know little what role they play in the important microbiota-host crosstalk in the colon epithelium. We will build on work from the Varga-Weisz and Vinolo laboratories that identified histone crotonylation as a modification that is dependent on the microbiota in the colon. We will use the mouse system to address three complementary questions: (I) how is histone crotonylation linked to gene expression genome-wide; (II) how are histone crotonylation and other modifications affected globally by the microbiota, using mass spectrometry and (III) how are changes in histone crotonylation linked to changes in chromatin structure. (AU)